CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Giorgadze, Ani |
|---|---|
| Title | The Necessity and Distorting Influences of Identity Politics in the Contemporary Context of Georgian LGBT Activism, The Need of Queering Politics |
| Summary | Revisiting problematization of the notion of fixed sexual identities as a foundation of social movements and rereading them in relation to the critique of such anti-identity politics discourse and describing the playfield that is set for Georgian LGBT organizations, I move to issues that were prevalent in interviews I have conducted with Georgian LGBT activists and expand on as matters of identity politics questions, including: the formation of LBT community; the rhetoric of being ‘born this way’; the necessity of coming out; homophobia as the choice and the LGBT Pride March. Discussing these questions I tried to illustrate politics of LGBT organizations, the dilemma of problematizing identity politics nowadays in Georgia and on the other hand the necessity of working on its violence producing side-effects. I believe that constructing ‘Queer’ as an enemy against embracing identities, in a place where collective understanding of identity is depoliticized and ‘Queer’ is an unaffordable social and political marker, will give a rise to anticipation and distrust towards it. I suppose that the question is ill-posed if it asks for choosing one, either embracing only rights based perspective or the radical transformational change that the movement can be engaged in. I argue that establishing queer politics as an exact opposite of identity politics is a dangerous theorization that might have fatal results for the activism characterized with identity politics as well as for the queer politics and its potentials since formulating the debate itself in dichotomous model and positing ‘Queer’ as an enemy of identity politics, might strengthen the exclusionary essentialist claims and leave no space for queering them, which is badly needed. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter; Barát, Erzsébet. |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/giorgadze_ani.pdf |
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